People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because >they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back >to their comfort zone.

Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or… why it really didn’t matter all that much… It was just confusing… and the first instance I joined ended up closing… which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.

Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.

Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.

I think the ideal would be not how to make it “like Reddit”, but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.

It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.

Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit… One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (!music@lemmy.world) and 18.9K (!music@hexbear.net). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.

I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.

I would say that you may consider first getting a clearer idea of what you want. For example

• You want some side work to generate some income?
• You want to explore doing consulting for a living?
• You want to find a project, or projects, that you can work on that produce revenue?

From what you wrote I think the fact that you work on so many things may be keeping you from been good at any of them. I recently saw an interview of the founder of Vercel. By the time he was in high school he was already getting job offers because he became know for been good at what he was doing.

I would suggest to try and get clarity on what you want and also remember that this is not a once in a lifetime decision… you can say “hey I want to try X…” and then after you actually try it realize is not what you wanted and then move to something else; the may takeaway is that trying to do lots of unrelated things likely will not help you achieve your goals… unless you could use all those contributions in open source as reference when applying to a job.